Ysabel guy gavriel kay

Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.” It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister,walk out that way afterwards, into the morning

Praise for Ysabel

“The past and the present are intertwined in this stylish novel … Kay tells a vivid and satisfyingtale, with moments of sublime eeriness.”

—The Washington Post

“Kay is at his finest … There are many writers who have shown us the gods walking among us, theage-old stories alive in the modern world Rare are those able to demonstrate that those gods, thosestories, live within us, and are as essential to our existence as oxygen Guy Gavriel Kay is one of

those rare few, and Ysabel is a splendid addition to his body of work.”

—The Globe and Mail

“Kay is such an excellent writer He establishes a potent challenge for his modern characters, whoare well-drawn and consistently believable in their reactions He gives them no option but tofollow this course of fantastical events to its logical conclusion This book is exciting—a real pageturner.”

—The Gazette (Montreal)

“The story is compelling, the pace is tantalizing and Kay makes the most of the splendid south ofFrance You can just about taste it.”

—Calgary Herald Review

“Ysabel, as much as the trilogy Kay was first known for, is an unpredictable, sometimes disquieting adventure—a Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for adults.”

—Winnipeg Free Press

“Kay has fashioned a taut and moving thriller, which also happens to be a powerful story of thecomplexities of family love and loss … The suspense will hold readers in thrall to the surprising

conclusion As Guy Gavriel Kay’s first venture into contemporary fantasy, Ysabel is just fantastic.”

—Edmonton Journal

“Ysabel is a bizarre and complex mix of themes, told with surprising ease; the winding tale reads

almost effortlessly, concealing Kay’s doubtless hours of research and work to keep the layeredstories together … This is unquestionably the work of a master.”

—Monday Magazine

“Infused with actual history and actual settings … If only more fantasy were like this book.”

—The Province (Vancouver)

“[Ysabel] reads like a perfectly cut jewel … The plot is necessarily complex, but is told with

meticulous and merciless speed, like a really fine thriller … And Kay is [so] superb on thelandscape and the artifacts of Provence … that one remembers being there.”

—Science Fiction Weekly

“Kay has a special affinity for the people behind the largerthan-life legends that persist throughtime His latest fantasy blends time and place in a crossing of worlds and universal truths Highly

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Kay brings a touch of the otherworldliness to present-day France … A powerful, engrossing read,which will satisfy Kay’s many fans and newcomers alike.”

—Quill & Quire

PENGUIN CANADA

YSABEL

GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry He won the 2008

World Fantasy Award for Ysabel, has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize, and

is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award His works have been translated into more thantwenty languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world

Visit his Canadian website at www.guygavrielkay.ca and his international website at

www.brightweavings.com

ALSO BY GUY GAVRIEL KAY

The Fionavar Tapestry

The Summer Tree The Wandering Fire The Darkest Road Tigana

A Song for Arbonne The Lions of Al-Rassan

The Sarantine Mosaic

Sailing to Sarantium Lord of Emperors The Last Light of the Sun

Beyond This Dark House

(poetry)

Under Heaven

GUY GAVRIEL KAY

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

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New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2007 Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2007 Published in this edition, 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2007

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1G6

Epigraph on page ix from “Juan at the Winter Solstice,” Complete Poems in One Volume, by Robert Graves Reprinted with permission

of Carcanet Press Limited.

Epigraph on page 507 from G: A NOVEL by John Berger, copyright © 1972 by John Berger Used by permission of Vintage Books, a

division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Kay, Guy Gavriel Ysabel / Guy Gavriel Kay.

ISBN 978-0-14-317449-3

I Title.

PS8571.A935Y83 2010 C813’.54 C2010-900454-X

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it

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2474

Linda McKnight

and

Anthea Morton-Saner

There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling,

Whether as learned bard or gifted child;

To it all lines or lesser gauds belong

That startle with their shining

Such common stories as they stray into.

—ROBERT GRAVES

Y SABEL

PROLOGUE

he woods came to the edge of the property: to the gravel of the drive, the electronic gate, and thegreen twisted-wire fence that kept out the boars The dark trees wrapped around one other homehidden along the slope, and then stretched north of the villa, up the steep hill into what could properly

be called a forest

The wild boar—sanglier—foraged all around, especially in winter Occasionally there might beheard the sound of rifle shots, though hunting was illegal in the oak trees and clearings surroundingsuch expensive homes The well-off owners along the Chemin de l’Olivette did what they could toprotect the serenity of their days and evenings here in the countryside above the city

Because of those tall eastern trees, dawn declared itself—at any time of year—with a slow, palebrightening, not the disk of the sun itself above the horizon If someone were watching from the villawindows or terrace they would see the black cypresses on the lawn slowly shift towards green andtake form from the top downwards, emerging from the silhouetted sentinels they were in the night.Sometimes in winter there was mist, and the light would disperse it like a dream

However it announced itself, the beginning of day in Provence was a gift, celebrated in words andart for two thousand years and more Somewhere below Lyon and north of Avignon the change wassaid to begin: a difference in the air above the earth where men and women walked, and looked up

No other sky was quite what this one was Any time of year, any season: whether a late autumn’scold dawn or midday in drowsy summer among the cicadas Or when the knife of wind—the mistral

—ripped down the Rhone valley (the way soldiers had so often come), making each olive or cypresstree, magpie, vineyard, lavender bush, aqueduct in the distance stand against the wind-scoured sky as

if it were the first, the perfect, example in the world of what it was

Aix-en-Provence, the city, lay in a valley bowl west of the villa No trees in that direction to blockthe view from this high The city, more than two thousand years old, founded by Romans conqueringhere—surveying and mapping, levelling and draining, laying down pipes for thermal springs, andtheir dead-straight roads—could be seen on spring mornings like this one crisply defined, almostsupernaturally clear Medieval houses and modern ones A block of new apartment buildings on anorthern slope, and—tucked into the old quarter—the bell tower of the cathedral rising

They would all be going there this morning A little later than this, but not too much so (two alarmclocks had gone off in the house by now, the one woman was already showering) You didn’t want tolinger of a morning, not with what they were here to do

Photographers knew about this light

They would try to use it, to draw upon it as someone with a thirst might have drawn from an ancientwell—then again at twilight to see how doorways and windows showed and shadowed differentlywhen the light came from the west, or the sky was blood-red with sunset underlighting clouds, anotherkind of offering

Gifts of different nuance, morning and evening here (noon was too bright, shadowless, for thecamera’s eye) Gifts not always deserved by those dwelling—or arriving—in a too-beautiful part ofthe world, where so much blood had been shed and so many bodies burned or buried, or leftunburied, through violent centuries

But as to that, in fairness, were there so many places where the inhabitants, through the longmillennia, could be said to have been always worthy of the blessings of the day? This serene andsavage corner of France was no different from any other on earth—in that regard.

There were differences here, however, most of them long forgotten by the time this morning’s firstlight showed above the forest and found the flowering Judas trees and anemones—both purple in hue,both with legends telling why

The tolling of the cathedral bells drifted up the valley There was no moon yet It would rise later,through the bright daylight: a waxing moon, one edge of it severed

Dawn was exquisite, memorable, almost a taste, on the day a tale that had been playing out forlonger than any records knew began to arc, like the curve of a hunter’s bow or the arrow’s flight andfall, towards what might be an ending

P ART O NE

CHAPTER I

ed wasn’t impressed As far as he could tell, in the half-light that fell through the small, highwindows, the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence was a mess: outside, where hisfather’s team was setting up for a pre-shoot, and inside, where he was entirely alone in the gloom

He was supposed to feel cool about being by himself in here Melanie, his father’s tiny assistant,almost ridiculously organized, had handed him a brochure on the cathedral and told him, with one ofher winks, to head on in before they started taking the test digitals that would precede the realphotographs for the book

She was being nice to him She was always nice to him, but it drove Ned a bit crazy that with

everything else she had to deal with, Melanie still—obviously—made mental notes to find things forthe fifteen-yearold tag-along son to do

Keep him out of the way, out of trouble She probably knew already where the music stores and

jogging tracks and skateboard parks were in Aix She’d probably known before they flew overseas,

googling them and making notes She’d probably already bought a deck and gear on Amazon orsomething, had them waiting at the villa for just the right time to give them to him, when he lookedcompletely bored or whatever She was perfectly nice, and even cute, but he wished she didn’t treathim as part of her job

He’d thought about wandering the old town, but he’d taken the booklet from her instead and goneinto the cathedral This was the first working day, first set-up for a shoot, he’d have lots of chanceslater to explore the city They were in the south of France for six weeks and his father would beworking flat out almost the whole time Ned figured it was just as easy to stick around the others this

morning; he was still feeling a bit disoriented and far from home Didn’t have to tell anyone that,

As Greg and Steve unloaded the van, there had even been a discussion, initiated by the city officialassigned to them, about men going up on ladders to take down a cable that ran diagonally across thestreet in front of the cathedral to the university building across the way Ned’s father had decided theycould eliminate the wire digitally if they needed to, so the students weren’t going to be deprived oflights in their classrooms after all

Nice of us, Ned had thought

Pacing back and forth, his father had started making crisp decisions, the way he always did whenfinally on location after the long buildup to a project Ned had seen him like this before

Barrett Reinhardt—the publisher’s art director for the book—had been here in Provence twomonths ago, preparing a list of possible photographs, emailing jpegs back to Edward Marriner in

Montreal, but Ned’s father always preferred to react to what he saw when he got to a place he was

shooting

He’d pointed out a balcony off the second floor of the university, right above the square, oppositethe facade, and decided they’d shoot with the digital camera from the ground, stitching a wide shot onthe computer, but he wanted to go up to that balcony and use large-format film from there.

Melanie, following him around with her binder, had scribbled notes in different-coloured inks.His father would make his photo selection later when he saw what they had, Ned knew Thechallenge would probably be getting the tall bell tower on the left and the full width of the buildinginto one shot Steve had gone with the guy from the mayor’s office into the university to see aboutaccess to the balcony

A crowd had gathered to watch them setting up Greg, using adequate French and a smile, wasmaking sure the spectators stayed around the edges of the square, out of the shots A gendarme hadcome to assist Ned had watched, sourly His French was better than the others’, but he hadn’tactually felt like helping He’d left at that point, and gone inside the cathedral

He really wasn’t sure why he was in such a bad mood On the face of it, he ought to have beenreally cool with this: out of school almost two months early, skipping exams (he did have three essays

to write here and deliver in July back home), staying in a villa with a swimming pool while his dadand the others did their work

Within the dark, high-vaulted cathedral, he abruptly removed his iPod buds and hit the off button

Listening to Houses of the Holy in here wasn’t quite as clever as he’d thought it would be He’d felt

silly and even a little bit nervous alone in a place this shadowy and vast, unable to hear anything

around him He could imagine the headlines: Canadian Student Stabbed by Led Zeppelin–Hating Priest.

The thought amused him, a little He’d put it in an email to the guys back home later He sat down

on a bench halfway up the central aisle, stretched out his legs, and glanced at Melanie’s booklet Thecover photo was taken from a cloister An arch in the foreground, a sunlit tree, the bell tower behind

against a really blue sky It was postcard pretty It probably was on a postcard.

His father would never take a picture like it, not in a million years Not of this cathedral EdwardMarriner had talked about that yesterday, while they’d watched their first sunset from the terrace

Ned opened the brochure There was a map at the front The light was dim, but his eyesight wasgood, he could make it out As best he could tell, from the map key on the facing page, this place hadbeen built in a dozen stages over too many centuries by too many people who didn’t care what hadbeen done before they arrived A mess

That was the point, his dad had explained The facade they were setting up to shoot was hemmed in

by Aix’s streets and squares It was part of them, entangled in the city’s life, not set back to beadmired the way cathedrals usually were The front had three styles and colours of stone that didn’t

come close to matching up with one another.

His father had said that was what he liked about it

Remember why we’re doing this shot, he’d reminded everyone as they’d piled out of the van andstarted unloading Perfect cathedral facades like Notre Dame in Paris or Chartres were snapped byevery tourist who saw them This one was different, and a challenge—for one thing, they couldn’tback up too much or they’d crash through a window into a university classroom and ruin a lecture onthe eternal greatness of France

Greg had laughed Suck, Ned had thought, and reached for his earbuds.

That was when Melanie had fished the brochure from her black shoulder tote The tote was almost

as big as she was The running joke was that half the missing objects in the world could be found in

Melanie’s bag, and she had a good idea where the other half were.

Alone inside, Ned studied the map and looked up Where he was sitting was called a nave, not an

aisle I knew that, he thought, inwardly imitating Ken Lowery’s exaggerated voice in science class.

As best he could tell, the nave had been finished in 1513 but the part just behind him was fourhundred years older, and the altar ahead was “Gothic,” whenever that was The small chapel behind

that had been built around the same time as the nave where he was sitting If you looked left or right,

the dates got even more muddled

He stood up and walked again It was a little creepy being alone in here, actually His footsteps, inNikes, were soundless He approached a side door with two heavy old iron locks and a new brassone A sign said it led out to the cloister and listed the times for tours The black iron locks didnothing any more, the new one was bolted Figured Couldn’t get out That might have been a coolidea, sit in a cloister and listen to music He didn’t have any religious music on the iPod, thank God,but U2 would have done

The cloister, Melanie’s map informed him, was really old, from the 1100s So was the side aisle

where he was standing now But the chapel up at the end of it was eighteenth century, the newest thinghere You could almost laugh They could put a Starbucks somewhere in this place and it would fit asmuch as anything else did Chapel of Saint-Java

He walked towards that late chapel by the steps to the altar Not much to see Some fat whitecandles had burned down, none were burning now People weren’t allowed inside this morning:Edward Marriner was at work out front

Ned crossed in front of the altar and worked his way back down the other side This aisle wasfrom 1695, the map told him He stopped to get his bearings: this would be the north side, the cloisterwas south, his father was shooting the west facade For no good reason it made him feel better towork that out

This was a shorter nave, hit a wall partway down Ned found himself back in the main section,looking up at a stained-glass window He found another bench near the last side chapel by the belltower Saint-Catherine’s, the brochure advised; it had been the university’s chapel

Ned imagined students hurrying here to confession five hundred years ago, then back across theroad to lectures What did they wear to school in those days? He popped in his buds again, dialingPearl Jam on the wheel

He was in the south of France Well, forgive him for not doing cartwheels His father would beshooting like a madman (his own word) from now to the middle of June The photographs were for a

big-deal book next Christmas Edward Marriner: Images of Provence , accompanying a text by

Oliver Lee Oliver Lee was from London but had lived down here for the last thirty years, writing(Melanie had told him all this) six novels, including some prize-winners Star English writer, starCanadian photographer, star French scenery Big-deal book

Ned’s mother was in the Sudan

The reports were of serious fighting again, north of Darfur She was almost certainly there, hethought, leaning back on the bench, closing his eyes, trying to let the music envelop him Angry music.Grunge

Pearl Jam finished, Alanis Morissette came up next on his shuffle The deal was, his mother wouldphone them here every second evening That, Ned thought bitterly, was going to for sure keep hersafe

Doctors Without Borders was supposed to be respected and acknowledged everywhere, but they

weren’t always, not any more The world had changed Places like Iraq had proven that, and theSudan was real far from being the smartest place on earth to be right now.

He pulled off the buds again Alanis complained a lot, he decided, for a girl from the OttawaValley who absolutely had it made

“Gregorian chants?” someone asked

Ned jerked sideways along the bench, turning his head quickly “What the—”

“Sorry! Did I scare you?”

“Hell, yes!” he snapped “What do you think?”

He stood up It was a girl, he saw

She looked apologetic for a second, then grinned She clasped her hands in front of her “Whathave you to fear in this holy place, my child? What sins lie heavy on your heart?”

“I’ll think of something,” he said

She laughed

She looked to be about his own age, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, Doc Martens, asmall green backpack Tall, thin, freckles, American accent Light brown hair to her shoulders

“Murder? T S Eliot wrote a play about that,” she said

Ned made a face Urk One of those “I know, Murder in the Cathedral We’re supposed to study

it next year.”

She grinned again “I’m geeky that way What can I say? Isn’t this place amazing?”

“You think? I think it’s a mess.”

“But that’s what’s cool! Walk twenty steps and you go five hundred years Have you seen the

baptistry? This place drips with history.”

Ned held out an open palm and looked up, as if to check for dripping water “You are a geek,

aren’t you?”

“Can’t tease if I admitted it Cheap shot.”

She was kind of pretty, in a skinny-dancer way

Ned shrugged “What’s the baptistry?”

“The round part, by the front doors.”

“Wait a sec.” Something occurred to him “How’d you get in? The place is closed for two hours.”

“I saw Someone’s taking photos outside Probably a brochure.”

“No.” He hesitated “That’s my dad For a book.”

“Really? Who is he?”

“You wouldn’t know Edward Marriner.”

Her jaw actually dropped Ned felt the familiar mix of pleasure and embarrassment “You messing

with me?” she gasped “Mountains and Gods? I know that book We own that book!”

“Well, cool What will it get me?”

She gave him a suddenly shy look Ned wasn’t sure why he’d spoken that way It wasn’t really him.Ken and Barry talked that way to girls, but he didn’t, usually He cleared his throat

“Get you a lecture on the baptistry,” she said “If you can stand it I’m Kate Not Katie, not Kathy.”

He nodded his head “Ned Not Seymour, not Abdul.”

She hesitated, then laughed again “All right, fine, I deserved that But I hate nicknames.”

“Kate is a nickname.”

“Yeah, but I picked it Makes a difference.”

“I guess You never answered how’d you get in?”

“Side door.” She gestured across the way “No one’s watching the square on that side Through thecloister Seen that yet?”

Ned blinked But he couldn’t say, after, that any premonition had come to him He was justconfused, that’s all

“The door to the cloister is locked I was there fifteen minutes ago.”

“Nope Open The far one out to the street and the one leading in here I just came through them.Come look The cloister is really pretty.”

It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister Not yet

Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang

“What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voicedown

Kate did the same “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered “Over there.” She pointed “Probablyone of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”

Another scraping sound

Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”

It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister,walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix Get a croissant and a Coke somewherewith this girl named Kate

His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of aninsanely dangerous place Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t knowthat part yet

He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round,pale space He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized He saw eight tall pillars, making asmaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else

“It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him “By a lot, like 500 A.D.”

He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had beenlifted from over a hole in the stone floor

Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate hadcovered And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone

who belonged in here.

The man had his back to them Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed Kate let out a gasp Theman in the pit didn’t move, and then he did

With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything thatcould be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife.Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives

The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction

He still didn’t turn around They couldn’t see his face Ned saw long—very long—fingers Theman was bald, or had shaved his head It was impossible to tell his age

There was a silence; no one moved This would be a good spot to save the game, Ned thought Then restart if my character gets killed.

“He isn’t here,” the man said quietly “I was quite sure but he is playing with me again He

enjoys doing that.”

Ned Marriner had never heard that tone in a voice It chilled him, standing in shadow, lookingtowards the soft light of the baptistry

The man had spoken in French Ned’s French was very good, after nine years of immersion classes

at home in Montreal He wondered about Kate, then realized she’d understood because, absurdly, as

if making polite conversation—with a knife lying on the stone floor—she asked, in the same language,

“Who isn’t here? There’s just a Roman street under there, right? It says so on the wall.”

The man ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t made any sounds that mattered in any way Nedhad a sense of a small man, but it was hard to tell, not knowing how deep the pit was He still hadn’tturned to look at them It was time to run, obviously This wasn’t a computer game He didn’t move

“Go away,” the man said, as if sensing Ned’s thought “I have killed children before I have nostrong desire to do so now Go and sit somewhere else I will be leaving now.”

Children? They weren’t kids.

Stupidly, Ned said, “We’ve seen you We could tell people ”

A hint of amusement in his voice, the man said dryly, “Tell them what? That someone lifted a grate

and looked at the Roman paving? Hélas ! All the gendarmes of France will be on the case.”

Ned might have grown up in too quick-witted a household, in some ways “No,” he said, “we couldsay someone threatened us with a knife.”

The man turned around, inside the opening in the floor

He was clean-shaven, lean-faced Dark, strong eyebrows, a long, straight nose, a thin mouth Thebald head made his cheekbones show prominently Ned saw a scar on one cheek, curving behind hisear

The man looked at them both a moment, where they stood together at the top of the three steps,before he spoke again His eyes were deep-set; it was impossible to see their colour

“A few gendarmes would be interested in that, I grant you.” He shook his head “But I am leaving Isee no reason to kill you I will replace the grate No damage has been done To anything Go away.”And then, as they still stood there, more in shock than anything else, he took the knife and put it out ofsight

Ned swallowed

“Come on!” whispered the girl named Kate She pulled at his arm He turned with her to go Thenlooked back

“Were you trying to rob something down there?” he asked

His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal

to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that

The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No Not that Ithought I was here soon enough I was wrong I think the world will end before I ever find him intime Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”

Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain Thewords made so little sense it wasn’t even funny Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time

He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before By Saint-Catherine’schapel

They sat down on the same bench Neither of them spoke Across the echoing, empty space of thedark cathedral they heard a clang and scrape, then a bang again Then nothing He’d be leaving now

Ned looked down at the iPod on his belt It seemed, just then, to be the strangest object imaginable.

A small rectangle that offered music Any kind of music you wanted Hundreds of hours of it Withlittle white buds you could put in your ears and block out the sounds of the world

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He looked over at the girl She was biting her lower lip, staring straight ahead Ned cleared histhroat It sounded loud “Well, if Kate is for Katherine,” he said brightly, “we’re in the right place.You can do the praying.”

“What the ?” She looked at him

He showed her the map, pointing to the name of the chapel His bad joke

“I’m not Catholic,” she said

He shrugged “I doubt that matters.”

“What what do you think he was doing?” She’d seemed pretty confident, assertive, when she’dfirst come over to him She didn’t seem that way now She looked scared, which was reasonable

Ned swore He didn’t swear as much as some of the guys did, but this particular moment seemed to

call for something “I have no idea What’s down there?”

“I think they’re just grates to let you look down and see the old Roman street The tourist stuff onthe wall also said there was a tomb, going back to the sixth century But that’s something I ” Shestopped

He stared at her

“What?”

Kate sighed “This is gonna sound geeky again, but I just like this stuff, okay? Don’t laugh at me?”

“I’m nowhere close to laughing.”

She said, “They didn’t bury people inside city walls back then It was forbidden That’s why thereare catacombs and cemeteries in Rome and Paris and Arles and other places—outside the walls.They buried the dead outside.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, the info thing posted over there shows a tomb here from the sixth century A little over fromwhere he was So how did well, how did someone get buried in here? Back then?”

“Shovels?” Ned said, more out of reflex than anything else

She didn’t smile

“You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked

“I don’t think anything Really He said he wasn’t But he also said ” She shook her head “Can

we go?”

Ned nodded “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, andthen me He gets intense when he’s working.”

“We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”

A penny dropped for Ned “Right That’ll be how he got in, I bet Between my seeing it locked and

your finding the two doors open.”

“You think he’s gone out that way?”

“Long gone by now.” He hesitated “Show me that baptistry first.”

“Are you crazy?”

“He’s gone, Kate.”

“But why do you ?”

Ned looked at her “History lesson? You promised.”

She didn’t smile “Why are you playing boy detective?”

He didn’t have a really good answer “This is a bit too weird I want to try to understand.”

“Ned, he said he’d killed children.”

He shook his head “I don’t think that means what we think it means.”

“And that sounds like a line from a bad movie.”

“Maybe But come on.”

“This where the creepy music starts?”

“Come on, Kate.”

He got up and she followed She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace ofthe villa that evening They didn’t know each other at all that first morning She could have gone outthe way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased

They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside thatinner ring of pillars The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming downthrough windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre

Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate If it was supposed to be a viewing point, itwasn’t much of one It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go

“Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said She was at the west wall, in front of some touristinformation, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood Ned walked over Basically, it was justanother map-key to this part of the interior Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed

to it As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century

“And look at this,” she said

She was pointing to an alcove on their left Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cowand below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment He could make out a small bird, part of somemuch larger work The rest of it was worn away

“These are even older,” Kate said

“What was this place, before? Where we are?”

“The forum was here Centre of town The Roman city was founded about a hundred and somethingyears B.C by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts

He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae Aquae, because of the waters There were hot springs until

recently That’s why there are so many fountains Have you seen them?”

“We just got here The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”

“Uh-huh There’s a sketch of it on the wall Where your dad is now was like the major intersection

of the Roman town That’s why that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here,back then.”

“Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”

She looked dubious “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”

“Google it later, or I will.”

“Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it Nedcould relate

He shook his head again He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why He looked at that

faded bull on the wall It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew This place was really old He shivered And perhaps because of that, because he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by

the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.

It was heavier than he’d expected He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’dheard before The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw He just had to lift and slide, but

“Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”

“Are you insane?”

“No but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t ”

She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over Therewas an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through

“You are not going down there,” Kate said “I am not staying to watch—”

“I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her And then, before he had time to think

about it and get really frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the pit, turned so he was facing the

side, and lowered himself Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or ratsskittering through the dark, ancient space below Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided

His feet touched bottom and he let go He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes

“You wouldn’t by any chance have—”

“Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment She handed him a small red metalflashlight “I keep one in my pack For walks at night.”

“Efficient of you Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned

on the beam

“You going to bother telling me why you are doing this?” she asked, from above.

“Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully

He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him He knelt The slabs weredamp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been

On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate Straight ahead the flashlight lit theshort distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course He saw worn steps The beampicked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing There were spiderwebs entangling it

No snakes, no rats Yet

To his left the space opened into a corridor

He’d been expecting that, actually That was the way back towards the main part of the cathedral,where the placard on the wall had said a tomb would be Ned took a deep breath

“Remember,” he said, “the iPod’s yours Don’t delete the Led Zep, or Coldplay.”

He bent low, because he had to He didn’t get very far, maybe twenty steps It didn’t go farther It

just hit another wall He’d be right under the first nave here, he thought The roof was really low.His flashlight beam played along the rough, damp surface in front of him It was sealed, closed off.Nothing that even vaguely resembled a tomb It looked like there were just the two corridors: from thegrate to the well, and this one

“Where are you?” Kate called

“I’m okay It’s closed up There’s nothing here Like he said Maybe this whole opening was justfor getting down to fix the pipes Plumbing Bet there are other pipes, and more grates around theother side of the well.”

“I’ll go look,” she called “Does this mean I don’t get the iPod?”

Ned laughed, startling himself as the sound echoed

And it was then, as he turned to go back, that the bright, narrow beam of Kate’s flashlight, playing

along the corridor, illuminated a recessed space, a niche cut in the stone wall, and Ned saw what wasresting in it.

“I found something,” he said.

His voice sounded strained, unnatural The flashlight beam wavered He tried to hold it steady butthe movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now Another recess The samething in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t Not quite the same

“Found? What do you mean?” Kate called

Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from aworld he’d left behind when he came down here He couldn’t answer He was actually unable tospeak He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other

The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was ahuman skull

He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously sethere to be seen This wasn’t a burial The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece

or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in hertravels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda

This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest

The second object made that even clearer In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside thefirst, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head

It was smooth, worn down, as if with age The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had beendecapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him acrosscenturies: a message he really didn’t want to understand In some ways it frightened him even more

than the bones He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”

He’d never seen anything like this carving Someone had gone to great pains to get down here,hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere.And the meaning was what?

“What is it?” Kate called “Ned, you’re scaring me.”

He still couldn’t answer her His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming Then, forcing himself

to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head wascompletely smooth on the top, as if bald And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear

He got out of there, as fast as he could

THEY SAT IN THE CLOISTER in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench Ned hadn’t been surehow much farther he could walk before sitting down

There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure It was bright withspringtime flowers in the small, quiet garden They were close to the door that led back into thecathedral There was no breeze here It was a peaceful place.

His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling

He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized They’d stayed just long enough

to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor He hadn’teven wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below

“Tell me,” said Kate

She was biting her lip again A habit, obviously He drew a breath and, looking down at his handsand then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head And the scar

“Oh, God,” she said

Which was just about right Ned leaned back against the rough wall

“What do we do?” Kate asked “Tell the the archaeologists?”

Ned shook his head “This isn’t an ancient find Think about it a second.”

“What do you mean? You said ”

“I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long Can’t have been Kate, people must

have been down there dozens of times More than that That’s what archaeologists do They’ll have

gone looking at those Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”

“The font,” she said “That’s what it is Not a well.”

“Whatever But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there People would

have seen and recorded and and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time.

They’d be in a museum by now There’d be stuff written about them They’d be on that tourist thing onthe wall, Kate.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated “And carved out thespaces for them, too.”

“Oh, God,” she said again

She looked at him In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair She hadfreckles across her nose and cheeks “You think for our guy to see?”

Our guy He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time His hands had stopped shaking, hewas pleased to see

He nodded “The head was him, for sure Bald, the scar Yeah, it was there for him.”

“Okay Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”

He did smile a little this time “You’re hopeless.”

“I’m thinking out loud, boy detective Got your cereal box badge?”

“Left it behind.”

“Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack

He took it from her “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again

He looked at the guide The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers

on the tree were identical He showed her

“Nice,” she said “It’s a Judas tree Who’s Melanie?”

Figured, that she’d know the tree “My dad’s assistant He has three people with him, and someonefrom the publisher coming, and me.”

“And what do you do?”

He shrugged “Hang out Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around “Anything here?”

“Fresh air I was getting sick inside.”

“Me too, down there I shouldn’t have gone.”

He looked back at Kate, who was still on the bench “Jeez, how did you figure this out?”

She grinned “I didn’t I’m cheating There’s another guide thing on the wall farther down I read itwhen I came through from outside The Queen of Sheba is on the other side.” She gestured across thegarden towards the walkway opposite

Because she was pointing, Ned looked that way, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise Andbecause he was standing where he was, he saw the rose resting against the two round columns ofanother pillar on the far side

And it was then—just then—that he began to feel really odd

It wasn’t fear (that had been in him awhile by then) or excitement; this was like somethingunblocking or unlocking, changing just about everything, really

Slowly, he went around that way along the shaded cloister walk, past the door to the street thatKate had used to get in He would have gone out that way with her a moment before Only a moment,and the story would have stopped for them

He went along that side and turned up the far one, opposite where they’d been Kate was stillsitting on the wooden bench, the green backpack on the stone paving beside her Ned turned his eyes

to the pillar in front of him, with the single rose leaning between the two columns He looked at thecarving

It wasn’t the Queen of Sheba

He was as sure of that as he’d been about anything in his life Whatever the printed sheet on thewall might tell you, that wasn’t who this was They didn’t always know, the people who wrotebrochures and guidebooks They might pretend, but they didn’t always know

He was aware of Kate getting up and coming towards him now, but he couldn’t take his eyes fromthe woman on the pillar This was the only one of all the slender, doubled columns here that had afull-length figure on it His heart was pounding again

She was worn almost completely away, Ned saw, more eroded than any of the other, smallercarvings he’d passed He didn’t know why that was, at first And then, because of what was opening

up inside him, he thought he did know

She had been made this way, barely carved into the stone, the features less sharply defined, meant

to fade, to leave, like something lost from the beginning

She was delicately slender, he saw, and would have been tall You could still see elegant, carefuldetails in the tunic she wore and the robe that swept to her ankles He could see braided hair falling

past her shoulders, but her nose and mouth were almost gone, worn away, and her eyes could barely

be seen Even so, Ned had a sense—an illusion?—of a lifted eyebrow, something ironic in that slimgrace

He shook his head This was an eroded sculpture in an obscure cloister It should have beencompletely unremarkable, the kind of thing you walked right past, getting on with your life

Ned had a sense of time suddenly, the weight of it He was standing in a garden in the twenty-first

century, and he was sharply aware of how far back beyond even a medieval sculpture the history ofthis ground stretched Men and women had lived and died here for thousands of years Getting on withtheir lives

And maybe they didn’t always go away after, entirely

It wasn’t the sort of thought he’d ever had before

“She was beautiful,” he said Whispered it, actually

“Well, Solomon thought so,” said Kate mildly, coming to stand beside him

Ned shook his head She didn’t get it

“Did you see the rose?” he said

“What rose?”

“Behind her.”

Kate dropped her pack and leaned forward over the railing that protected the garden

“There aren’t there aren’t any rose bushes here,” she said, after a while

“No I think he brought it Put it here before he went inside.”

“He? Our guy? You mean ?”

Ned nodded “And he’s still here.”

“What?”

He had just realized that last part himself, the thought arriving as he formed the words He’d beenthinking, reaching within, trying to concentrate And it had come to him

He was scaring himself now, but there was something he could see in his mind—a presence of light

or colour, an aura Ned cleared his throat You could run away from a moment like this, close youreyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real

Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told usyou were leaving Why are you still up there?”

He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter Things had changed He would place thebeginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of awoman carved in stone hundreds of years ago

Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway

There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street If he hadn’t been socertain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, makinghim say and do entirely weird things

Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility

“I will now confess to being surprised.”

The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of thecathedral They couldn’t see him It didn’t matter Same voice

Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run

“Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”

“I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate “Please don’t kill us.”

It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was

actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.

His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this

The voice from the roof was grave “I said I wouldn’t.”

“You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said

“I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”

Ned would remember that He’d remember almost everything, in fact He said, “You know thatyour face is down in the corridor, back there?”

“You went down? That was brave.” A pause “Yes, of course it is.”

Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this

properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way

“I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke

“Someone might have liked it to be.”

Ned dealt with that, or tried to And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way

as before “Who who was the model for her, then?” he asked He was looking at the woman on

the column He found it hard not to look at her

Silence above them Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed Inside his mind he could actuallyplace the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured

“I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally “You have blundered into a corner of a very oldstory It is no place for children Believe me,” he said again

“I do,” Kate said, with feeling “Believe me!”

Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard He was surprised how much of that was in him thesedays “Right,” he said “Run along, kids Well, what am I supposed to do with this feeling I have

in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there This is completely messed up What am I supposed to do with it?”

After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently “You are hardly the first person tohave an awareness of such things You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do ” That

hint of amusement again “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd What is there to do in a life?

Finish growing up; most people never do Find what joy there is to find Try to avoid men withknives We are not this story is not important for you.”

Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared That, too, was strange In the lingering resonance

of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”

“No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive “As you just put it: run along That will be best,whatever it does to your vanity I am not as patient as I might once have been.”

“Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked

“What?” cried Kate again.

In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, aboveand to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down The man on the roof somersaulted off the slantingtiles to land in the garden in front of them His face was vivid with rage, bone white He lookedexactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought

“How did you know that?” the man snarled “What did he tell you?”

He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest;

could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack ofhair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth His grey-blue eyeswere also hard The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by thethroat Someone Ned knew who that would be.

But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.

Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, boredand edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother Only that last wasstill true An hour ago the world had been a different place

“Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said “I don’t know how I know these things I asked you

that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”

“Ned,” said Kate Her voice creaked like it needed oiling “This sculpture was made eight hundredyears ago.”

“I know,” he said

The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”

They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned The leather jacket was slategrey, his shirt underneath was black “You have surprised me again It doesn’t often happen.”

“I believe that,” Ned said

“This is still not for you You have no idea of what you have no role I made a mistake, back

there If you won’t go, I will have to leave you There is too much anger in me I do not feel veryresponsible.”

Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little “You will not let us do anything?”

A movement of the wide mouth “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you wouldrealize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful

“Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class

The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, butlit by the April sun in a garden

“Why now?” Ned asked “Why here?”

They could hear the traffic from outside again Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right inthe middle of it

The man was silent for what seemed a long time Ned had a sense that he was actually near toanswering, but then he shook his head He walked across the middle of the cloister and steppedbetween two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to thestreet and world

“Wait!”

It was Kate this time

The man paused again, his back still to them It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned He wouldn’thave stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had

“Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone

He did turn, after all, at that

He looked at Kate across the bright space between He was too far away for them to make out hisexpression

“Not yet,” he said

Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him

They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in somany ways, from the world.

Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps Hefelt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him

From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving People said she

was the Queen of Sheba It was posted that way on the wall How did he know they were wrong? It

was ridiculous

Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of thecorners were This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top It wasdone in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman

Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if heunderstood properly—hundreds of years after that He stared at it, almost angrily

“What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded

Kate cleared her throat “New Testament Symbol of St Luke.”

Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him

“I doubt it,” he said finally “Not this one Not the old one inside, either.”

“What are you saying now?”

He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same Maybe

they were kids Someone had pointed a knife towards them And that was almost the least of it.

He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again.Palecoloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away Barely anything to be seen, as if shewere a rendering of memory itself Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’dbeen loved

And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother He shook his head.

“I don’t know what I’m saying Let’s get out of here.”

“Need a drink, Detective?”

He managed a smile “Coke will do fine.”

KATE KNEW WHERE she was going She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café afew minutes from the cathedral

Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had toadmit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school inNew York City and one here in Aix Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was withthe girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer

Her last name was Wenger She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both Shewanted to teach, or maybe study law Or both She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed somethinglike that) She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did,but was pretty good She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with

Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used

Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him

“It sucks, lying for her,” she said “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”

“Sounds like a babe, though Got her phone number?”

Kate made a face “You aren’t even close to serious.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”

That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid

Ned didn’t say anything He sipped his drink and looked around The long, narrow café had twosmall tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door Themorning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones

“Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment “That was a weird thing to say.”

He shrugged “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture Or what happened.”

She was biting at her lip again

“Why was he our guy why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have

been the font, something about the water?”

Ned shook his head “Don’t think so The skull and the carved head were the other way, along thecorridor.” He had a thought “Kate if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up,right? Not left a coffin lying around.”

She nodded her head “Sure.”

“So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up For some reason.”

Kate leaned back in her chair “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”

“I don’t know what it is I don’t think so.”

“But you said he made that carving in the cloister You do know how old that thing is?”

“Look, forget what I said there I was a bit out of it.”

“Nope.” She shook her head “You weren’t When he came down from the roof I thought he was

going to kill you And then he said when it was done.”

He sighed “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said

“It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling

“Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”

“She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages Am I bugging you?”

“No Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”

Kate still didn’t smile “Something did happen to you back there.”

“Yeah I’m all right now Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh “Wanna make out?”

She ignored that, which was what it deserved “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with

I don’t know.”

He nodded “That’s it Something to do with I don’t know.”

He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with a girl from New York, from now, drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to

—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over

In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t He wasn’t going to say that,though

He looked at his watch “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated This part wastricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him “You got a phonenumber? We can keep in touch?”

She smiled “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”

“Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a dealbreaker.”

She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiralbound agenda she pulled from her pack andscribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number Ned took from his wallet thecard on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the housephone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies She’dput a little smiley face at the bottom.

When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him theirlatitude and longitude

He read Kate the villa number She wrote it down

“You have school tomorrow?”

She nodded “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow I’m there till five Meet here after? Can you findit?”

He nodded “Easy Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”

She did laugh this time, after a second

They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside He watched her walk away through themorning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousandyears ago

CHAPTER III

he morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back He helped Steve and Greg load the van.They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from thepolice, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away

The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially atthe start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first

morning He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.

Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table “Anything inside I need toknow about?”

Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on ashoot When Ned was a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way He felt important, included.More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied In fact, “more recently” extendedright up to this morning, he realized

Something had changed He said, “Not too much, I don’t think Pretty dark, hard to find angles Likeyou said, it’s all jumbled You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in.There’s light there and it is really old Way older than the rest.” He hesitated “The cloister was open,

I got a look in there, too.”

“The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin Forsomeone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought

“Whatever This one looked good,” he said “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but ifyou don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said,

“There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff Saints on the four corners One sculpture’s supposed to

be the Queen of Sheba She’s really worn away, but have a look.”

His father stroked his brown moustache Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashionedhandlebar moustache It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with twoupward moustache curves People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife likedthe look, and that was that

Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow We’ve got two more hours cleared soI’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to dothem again Will I need lights?”

“Inside? For sure,” Ned said “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up.Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”

“Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said “They’ll have power.”

“The baptistry’s off to one side.”

“Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling BeardedGreg made a face at Ned Steve just grinned Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemedengaged, and she saw that as part of her job

Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheerroutine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened It might bring the place back to now

from wherever it had been this morning.

It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column He couldn’t have saidwhy, but he knew he wanted it He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’tabout to do that

His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film

to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when hewas here Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the

Romans had discovered Kate Wenger had just told him about those She just about forced you to call

her a geek, that girl

For the book, Ned’s father had to balance the things he wanted to photograph with pictures thatmatched Lee’s text That was partly Barrett Reinhardt’s job: to merge the work of two important men

in a big project His idea, apparently, was to have smaller black-andwhite pictures tucked into thetext that Lee had written, along with Marriner’s full-page or double-page colour shots

Ned didn’t feel like looking at fountains He knew what he did need to do Greg was going back up

to the villa to upload the digitals from this morning and check them on the monitor He was also going

to confirm by phone the arrangements for shooting in Arles, about an hour away, the day aftertomorrow

Melanie handed Greg detailed instructions about that, printed in her usual green ink Ned saw asmiley face at the bottom of the card He was pleased to see he wasn’t the only one she did that to

He rode back with Greg in the van, changed into a faded-out grey T-shirt, and shorts, clipped onhis water bottle and pedometer, put the iPod in its armband, and went for a run He had essays towrite here, and a training log to complete for his track coach Both were homework, really

The running was better

Melanie had told him the night before that if he went down their laneway and turned right at theroad instead of left towards town, then kept going as it curved back uphill, he’d end up eventuallywhere the road ended at some area where people biked and jogged in the countryside She said therewas supposed to be an old tower up there to look at

It irritated him, as usual, that she was organized to the point of planning his training routes, but hehad no better idea where to go, and there wasn’t a good reason not to try that path

It was a steep downhill on their little road past the other villas, and then steadily back up for along, winding way along the ridge above Up-and-down was good, of course Ned ran on the cross-country team, this was what he needed

He’d begun to think he’d gone wrong before he finally came to the car barrier On the other side of

it he found the trail There were arrows on a wooden pole pointing one way towards a village calledVauvenargues and in the other direction to that tower Melanie had mentioned Someone went by on amountain bike towards Vauvenargues Ned went the other way

The tower wasn’t far The trail continued down and around it towards the northern edges of Aix, itlooked like Ned didn’t like to stop during a run, no one did, but the view from up here was prettycool and so was the round, ruined lookout tower He wondered how old it was

This whole place was just saturated in the past, he thought Layers and layers of it It could get toyou, one way or another He took off the earbuds and drank some water

There was a low, really lame fence around the tower A sign said it was dangerous to cross and abigger fence had been authorized and was coming, but there was no one in sight now so Ned wentover the railing and then he bent and stepped into the tower through a crumbled opening in the honey-

coloured stones.

It was dark inside after the sunlight There was no door anywhere, just the one broken opening Helooked up in a high, empty space He could see the sky a long way above, a small circle of blue-black It was as if he were at the bottom of a well There were probably bats, he thought There musthave been a stairway once, winding up, but there was nothing now He wondered what this hadguarded against, what they’d been watching for up here

He felt himself cooling down too much in the shade, not good You pulled muscles that way Hestepped back into the sunshine, blinking, and gazed down at the city There was an aqueduct in thedistance, on the far side of Aix, vividly clear After a moment, Ned spotted the bell tower of thecathedral in the middle of town, and that brought him back to this morning He was nowhere close towanting that

He turned and started running again, back the way he’d come, but with the stop and cooling downand jet lag, he had lost his rhythm He found it harder going than he should have, past the car barrierand downhill now along the road It was a good jogging route, though, had to give Melanie credit.Next time he could go the other way at the signpost, keep going, log his proper distance

He was halfway back up their own steep road, leading to Villa Sans Souci at the top, when herealized something

He stopped running, having actually shocked himself

Why now? he had said, and the man in the grey leather jacket hadn’t replied Maybe Ned had an

answer, after all Maybe it even mattered, for the first time, that when she was alive his grandmotherhad told him some of her old stories

Ned walked thoughtfully up the last part of the hill and punched the gate code to get onto theproperty He paced up and down the terrace for a bit, stretching He thought about jumping in thepool, but it wasn’t that warm, and he went upstairs and showered instead, dropping his clothes in thehamper for the cleaning help The villa had been rented with two women to work for them Both werenamed Vera, which made for challenges Greg had named them Veracook and Veraclean

Pulling on his jeans, Ned went down and into the kitchen He got a Coke from the fridge Veracook,clad in black, grey hair pulled tightly in a bun, was there She had baked some kind of hard biscuits

He took one From by the stove, she smiled approval

Greg was on his cellphone in front of the computer in the dining room, so the house line was free.Ned went back upstairs and into his father’s bedroom and dialed the mobile number Kate Wenger hadgiven him

“Bonjour?”

“Um, hi, I’m looking for Marie-Chantal.”

“Screw you, Ned.” But she laughed “Miss me already? How sweet.”

He felt himself flush, was glad she couldn’t see it “I just came in from a run Um, I realizedsomething.”

“That you did miss me? I’m flattered.” She was sassy on the phone, he thought He wondered how

she was on IM or texting Everyone got looser online

“No, listen Um, it’s April thirtieth on Thursday Then May Day.”

Kate was silent He was wondering if he’d have to explain, then heard her say, “Jeez, Ned

Beltaine? That’s a major deal Ghosts and souls, like Hallowe’en How do you know this? You a

closet nerd?”

“My mom’s family’s from Wales My grandmother told me some of this stuff We used to go on apicnic sometimes, on the first of May.”

“Want to go on a picnic?”

“If you bring Marie-Chantal.” He hesitated “Kate, where were the Celts around here? Were they

here?”

“Yeah, they were I can find out where.”

“I can, too, I guess.”

“No, you leave the heavy lifting to me, Grasshopper You just keep running and hopping See youtomorrow after school?”

“See you.” He hung up, grinning in spite of himself It was nice, he thought, to meet a girl in asituation where he didn’t have to explain her, or what was going down, to the other guys Privacy, thatwas the thing You didn’t get a lot of it back home

THEY HAD DINNER at the villa, French time: after eight o’clock The clear understanding, Melanie

explained seriously, was that they had to eat here every so often or Veracook would get insulted and

depressed (“Veradepressed!” Greg said) and start burning their food and stuff like that

Before they ate, Ned’s father took a vodka and tonic out on the terrace while the others went intothe pool Melanie, tiny as she was, looked pretty good in a bathing suit, Ned decided She made a bigdeal about the water being freezing cold (it was) but got herself in Steve was a swimmer, had thelong arms and legs He was methodically doing laps, or trying to—the pool wasn’t really big enough

As Ned and his father sat watching them, Greg suddenly burst through the terrace doors, sprangdown the wide stone steps, across the grass, and cannonballed into the water, wearing the baggiest,most worn-out bathing suit Ned had ever seen

Edward Marriner, laughing, offered an immediate pay bonus if Greg promised to use their nextcoffee break to buy a new swimsuit in town and spare them the sight of this one again Melanieshouted a suggestion that Greg could skinny-dip if he wanted to save the money Greg, splashing andwhooping in the frigid water, threatened to take her up on it

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said

“And why not?”

Melanie laughed “Shrinkage in cold water Male pride End of story.”

“You have,” Greg said after a moment, “a point.” Steve, who had stopped his laps, laughed aloud

Up on the terrace, Ned looked at his father and they exchanged a smile

“You okay so far?” his dad asked

“She’d have figured it out eventually,” said Ned

They left it at that They didn’t talk a whole lot these days Ned had overheard a couple of his

parents’ conversations at night about “fifteen years old” and “mood swings.” It had made him think

about being totally affectionate for a couple of weeks, just to mess with their heads, but it felt like toomuch work

Ned didn’t mind his father, though It got old after a while watching people go drop-jawed, the way

Kate Wenger had, when they learned who he was, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault, really Mountains and Gods was one of the best-selling photography books of the past ten years, and Passageways,

though less flashy (it didn’t have the Himalayas, his dad used to say), had won awards all over the

place His father was one of the few people who took pictures for both Vanity Fair and National Geographic You had to admit that was cool, if only to yourself.

When the others came shivering out of the pool to dry off, Melanie said, “Hold it a sec Forgotsomething.”

“What? You? Forget?” Steve said His yellow hair was standing up in all directions “No possibleway!”

She stuck out her tongue at him, and disappeared inside Her room was the only bedroom on themain floor She came dripping back out, still wrapped in her towel, with another one around her hairnow She was holding a bag that said “France Telecom.” She dropped it on the table in front of Ned

“In case Ground Control needs to reach Major Tom,” she said

She’d gotten him a cellphone It was, Ned decided, easy to be irritated with tiny Melanie and herhyperefficiency, but it was kind of hard not to appreciate her

“Thanks,” he said “Really.”

Melanie handed him another of her index cards, with his new phone number written out in green on

it, above another smiley face “It has a camera, too The package is open,” she added, as he pulled outthe box and the fliptop phone “I programmed all our numbers for you.”

Ned sighed It was too easy to be irritated with her, he amended, inwardly “I could have done

that,” he said mildly “I actually passed cellphone programming last year.”

“I did it in the cab coming back up here,” she said “I have fast fingers.” She winked

“Oh, ho!” said Greg, chortling

“Be silent, baggy suit,” Melanie said to him “Unless you are going to tell me that Arles is up andrunning.”

“Up and run your fast fingers over my baggy suit and I’ll tell you.”

Ned’s father shook his head and sipped his drink “You’re making me feel old,” he said “Stop it.”

“The house line is 1, your dad’s 2, I’m 3, Steven’s 4 Greg is star-pound 7,” Melanie said sweetly

key-star-865-star-pound-Ned had to laugh Even Greg did Melanie grinned triumphantly, and went back in to shower andchange Greg and Steve stayed out for a beer, drying off in the mild evening light Greg said it waswarmer on the terrace than in the pool

It wasn’t even May yet, Ned’s father pointed out The French didn’t start swimming until June,usually There was water in the villa’s pool only as a courtesy to their idiocy The sun was west, overthe city There was a shining to the air; the trees were brilliant

A moment later, the serenity of that Provençal sunset was shattered by a startling sound Then itcame again After a brain-cramp moment, Ned recognized it: the tune from Disneyland’s kiddie ride,

“It’s a Small World.”

The four of them looked around Their gazes fell, collectively, upon Ned’s new phone on the table.Warily, he picked it up, flipped it open, held it to his ear

“Forgot to mention,” Melanie said from her own mobile in the house He heard her trying not tolaugh “I programmed a ringtone for you, too Tried to find something suitable.”

“This,” Ned said grimly into the phone, “means war You do know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, Ned!” she giggled, “I thought you’d like it!” She hung up.

Ned put the phone down on the glass tabletop He looked out for a second at the lavender bushesplanted beyond the cypresses and the pool, and then at the three men around the table They wereeach, including his father, struggling to keep a straight face When he looked at them, they gave up,toppling into laughter

HE COULDN’T SLEEP

How unsurprising, Ned thought, punching his pillow for the twentieth time and flipping it overagain Jet lag would be part of it, on this second night overseas They were six hours ahead ofMontreal It was supposed to take a day for each hour before you adjusted Unless you were an airlinepilot or something

But it wasn’t really the time difference and he knew it He checked the clock by the bed again:almost three in the morning The dead of night On April 30 that might have another meaning, Nedthought

He’d have to remember to tell that one to Kate Wenger later today She’d get the joke If he couldkeep his eyes open by then, the way tonight was going

He got up and went to the window, which was open to the night air He had the middle bedroom ofthe three upstairs His dad was in the master, Greg and Steve shared the last one

He pulled back the curtain His window was over the terrace, looking out at the pool and thelavender bushes and a clump of trees on the slope by the roadway If he leaned out and looked to hisright, he could see Aix’s lights glowing in the distance The moon was orangered, hanging over thecity, close to full He saw the summer triangle above him Even with moonlight, the stars were a lotbrighter than they were in Westmount, in the middle of Montreal

He wondered how they looked above Darfur right now His mom would phone this evening—ortomorrow evening—whatever you said when it was 3:00 a.m

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He hadn’t wanted to think about that, but how did you control what you thought about, anyhow?Especially at this hour, half awake The mind just went places Don’t think about pink elephants,

or girls’ breasts, or when they wore skirts and uncrossed their legs Sometimes in math class he’dwander off in his thoughts for a run, or think about music, or a movie he’d seen, or what some girl

he’d never met had typed privately to him in a chatroom the night before If it was a girl: there was

always that to worry about online His friend Doug was totally paranoid about it

You thought about a lot of different things, minute by minute, through a day Sometimes late at nightyou thought about a skull and a sculpted head in a corridor underground

And that was going to be so helpful in getting to sleep, Ned knew So would brooding about what

had happened inside him this morning

After another minute, irresolute, he made an attempt to access, locate—whatever word would suit

—that place within himself again The place where he’d somehow sensed the presence of the lean,nameless man on the roof above them And where he had grasped another thing he had no proper way

of knowing: that the person up there, today—right here, right now—had made the old carving they’d been looking at

eight-hundred-year-Kate had been right, of course: the man’s response, hurtling down to confront them, white with

rage, had told them what they needed to know.

But Ned couldn’t feel anything inside now, couldn’t find whatever he was looking for He didn’tknow if that was because it was over—a totally weird flicker of strangeness in the cloister—or if it

was because there was nothing to find at this moment, looking out over dark grass and water and

cypress trees in the night

There wasn’t a whole lot of point standing here in sleep shorts thinking about it He decided to godown for a glass of juice On the way downstairs, barefoot in a sleeping house, he had an idea Agood one, actually When you couldn’t do anything about the strange, hard things, you did what youcould in other ways

He had warned Melanie, after all.

She, the ever-efficient one, had rigged up a multicharger station for all the mobile phones on thesideboard in the dining room She had even been helpful enough to label everyone’s slot In green ink

It was almost too easy

Working quickly through the options on each phone, Ned cheerfully changed Greg’s ring to thetheme from “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and showed no mercy for Steve, innocent bystander though hemight have been, rejigging his cell to play “The Teletubbies Song.” He left his father’s alone

Then he took his time, scrolling thoughtfully through the choices on Melanie’s phone a couple oftimes before deciding

Afterwards, pleased with himself and his contribution to justice in the world, he went and got hisjuice from the kitchen He took it out on the terrace, standing shirtless in the night It was cold now.His mother would have made him get a shirt or a robe if she’d been up If she’d been here

He tried, one more time, to see if he could find something within himself, feel attuned to anything.Nothing there He looked out across the landscape and saw only night: pool and woods and grass tothe south under stars A low moon west He heard an owl behind him There were trees all around thevilla, plenty of room for nests, and hunting

As it happens, he is being watched

In the small stand of trees beside the lavender bushes, the figure observing him has long agolearned how to keep from being sensed in any of the ways Ned Marriner might know or discover bysearching inside himself

Certain skills and knowledge are part of his heritage Others have taken time and considerableeffort He has had time, and has never been fazed by difficulty

He’d seen the boy appear at the open window upstairs, and then, a little later, watched him comeoutside, half naked, vulnerable and alone The observing figure is amused by this, by almost all thathas happened today, but he does think about killing him

It is almost too easy

Because of the day that is coming he holds himself in check If you are in the midst of shapingsomething urgently awaited, you do not give way to impulses like this, however satisfying they might

be He is impulsive by nature, but hardly a fool He has lived too long for that

The boy, he has decided, is random, trivial, an accident, not anyone or anything that matters And it

is not a good idea to cause any disturbance now, among either the living or the spirits, some of themalready beginning to stir He knows about the spirits He is waiting for them, diverting himself as best

he can while he does so